News Portals (Slash-alikes and the *Nuke family)

Many small and large organizations are getting CMS functionality from news portal tools like those used on Slashdot.

Indeed there may be more of these CMS-lite tools than there are CMS themselves. Combined slash-alike downloads may be in the hundreds of thousands.

The main organizing principle (information architecture) of a news portal is time (reverse chronology), like a weblog. News portals generally also include two arbitrary categories (subject and topic) as additional architecture elements.

News portals generally offer a limited selection of template designs, although most will let you edit the template to your own look.

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News Portals have several characteristics that make them a CMS. And they are very important, because arguably more content is being managed in these news portals than all the content in more standard CM systems.

They separate content from presentation (layout). This is a major time saver when the blog needs to be redesigned. Change the template, and hundreds of pages change together.

They use templates and feed content objects into the templates. However, they do not generally have a WYSIWYG template editor.

They use RSS syndication of stories.

They have WYSIWYG editors.

They can have multiple authors (team blogs), but rarely have any workflow.

They typically offer two dimensions/categories of information organization, topics and sections. These typically have associated icons, so articles are quickly identifiable visually.

Most are designed to support easily expanded communities. Some can federate user logins between communities (they exchange username/password databases).

Some allow certain community members to rate the postings of others (karma system). This moves the highly rated posts up and pushes noise (common in an open community) down in ranking. A user who sets the rank/rating moderately high sees no noise.